Re: Impressions of EGL - Part Duex

Bradley V. Stone wrote:

The difference is that the original argument for RPG-CGI vs. EGL is that
with RPG you don't have to learn anything else. That's simply not the
case. To do what Nathan is suggesting requires in-depth knowledge of
HTML, JavaScript and the Document Object Model. There's a lot less to
learn with EGL.

Who said that? You don't need to learn anything else. That's Ludacris
(luda!)

If you don't know what your tools (HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc) can do, it's
hard to know what you are ABLE to do with them, even if their use is
transparent.

That depends. I always try to compare it to using SDA vs. using the DSM APIs. Going in and hand-coding JavaScript that accesses the DOM is like using the DSM APIs. You can do it, and it even allows you to do a few things that you can't do otherwise for specialized situations. But is it the tool you want to use for day-to-day business programming? No, you want to use SDA, because it gives you a WYSIWYG design capability and a high-level abstraction of the various capabilities.

EGL and JSF does exactly the same thing for browsers. You don't have to learn the JavaScript or the HTML required to lay out the page; you do it all with the WYSIWYG tooling. The nice thing about EGL, though, is that if you do need advanced capabilities, you can go down into the JavaScript. You can easily write your own JS functions and insert them into the JSF page. It's as if you've got SDA *and* the DSM APIs at your disposal.

For RPG programmers, I think it's the best of both worlds: a way to quickly be able to build good looking JSF pages without having to learn the internals, while at the same time providing an avenue to apply such knowledge as you gain it.

Joe